Weekly Doses of Survival and Competition to Build Viewer Loyalty

THE National Geographic Channel will begin a branding campaign on Sunday to introduce its new programming strategy to viewers and advertisers.

Courteney Monroe, the channel’s chief marketing officer, said its executives had worked since 2011 to switch its programming from being four-fifths documentaries and one-fifth series to four-fifths series and one-fifth documentaries. “It’s very hard to build a big, loyal audience without recurring series,” she said.

Those series include “Wicked Tuna,” about fishermen from Gloucester, Mass., and “Doomsday Preppers,” about Americans preparing for the end of the world, both introduced last year; “Brain Games,” introduced last month; and “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” which is set to premiere on Sunday. The channel, a joint venture begun in 2001 between the National Geographic Society and Fox Cable Networks, also recently began producing factually based dramas, like “Killing Lincoln,” which ran in February.

The final episode of the current season of “Wicked Tuna” will be shown on Sunday, followed by the first episode of “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” which Ms. Monroe said makes the evening “the ideal launch for the new brand campaign.”

The channel’s strategy so far appears to have had mixed results: according to Nielsen, the Sunday night showings of “Wicked Tuna” during Season 1 averaged 805,000 viewers, climbing to 953,000 in Season 2 through May 5. Average viewership of Tuesday night showings of “Doomsday Preppers,” however, fell from 936,000 in Season 1 to 736,000 in the second season.

Created by the New York office of BBDO, part of the Omnicom Group, the advertising is the channel’s first new branding campaign since 2009. It includes three spots on three of the new series, each 30 and 45 seconds long. The first, based on “Doomsday Preppers,” depicts a birthday party for a little girl in an underground bunker, who receives a gas mask as a present.

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New ads for National Geographic Channel feature characters representing series like “Doomsday Preppers,” about Americans preparing for the end of the world.

The second spot features Dave Marciano, a fishing boat captain who appears on “Wicked Tuna,” anxiously awaiting a possible catch, while the third spot, promoting “Ultimate Survival Alaska,” follows two adventurers racing to catch an airplane through snowy, icy terrain.

All three ads also feature viewers immersed in the environment of each series, watching the action unfold alongside characters representing the series while dressed in sweat pants and nightclothes, and engaged in activities like brushing their teeth and eating. They are invisible to the characters.

There is also a fourth spot, in 60- and 90-second versions, showing segments of the other three. None of the spots has dialogue; each ends with the tagline, “The places we take you ... aren’t just on the map.”

Greg Hahn, an executive creative director at BBDO New York, said the agency “knew we needed to show some original content and to bring the viewer into it, but we didn’t want to show clips, or people at home watching TV.”

He added, “We wanted to show the emotional response of people to the programming. It’s not just about the geographic places it takes you but also the emotional places. National Geographic magazine and National Geographic Channel have a long history of taking you to exotic places, showing you new locations. We wanted to build off that, open up a new way of looking at the brand.”

The new advertising will first appear on Sunday night on National Geographic Channel in the United States; it will also appear, starting Thursday, on the channel’s Web site and its Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

The spots will run in the future on sister channels of National Geographic Channel, Nat Geo WILD, which offers wildlife and natural history programming, and Nat Geo Mundo, a Spanish-language channel. They will also run later on National Geographic channels outside the United States, in 170 countries.

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An ad for the National Geographic Channel features characters from “Wicked Tuna,” about fishermen from Gloucester, Mass.

National Geographic Channel will also run the 90-second version of the spot featuring all three series in movie theaters in the United States this summer. It will buy time on cable sports, news and nonfiction TV channels to run the advertising, which will also run on various Fox channels.

In addition, there will be a contest that will begin Sunday night and will allow viewers to post pictures of themselves in “their favorite place off the map” to the channel’s Instagram account; the prize will be state-of-the-art camera equipment.

Ms. Monroe said the channel’s main audience was now slightly more male than female and its programming was aimed at adults ages 25 to 54. She said the campaign was directed at these viewers, new viewers and members of the advertising, creative and television production and distribution communities.

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She also said the budget for the campaign was about $10 million through September; this includes the value of time for ads on its own channels.

According to Kantar Media, National Geographic Channel’s advertising expenditures have ranged from a low of $5 million in 2008 to a high of $17.3 million last year; these figures do not reflect time used to run advertising on National Geographic Channel.

John Greening, a professor of branding and marketing communications at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, called National Geographic Channel’s strategy of focusing on series an effort to “get more sticky. They have a reason for the audience to come back over and over, because of their loyalty and continuing interest in the story and characters.”

He said the campaign’s creative concept, “the idea that TV brings you to where the action is, is about as old as Edward R. Murrow,” and suggested that its true goal was to show “who we are today” to prospective distributors, advertisers and others in the TV business, rather than to viewers.

Marshall R. Kohr, a lecturer in branding and marketing communications at Medill, called the campaign’s subject matter questionable from the perspective of new viewers. “Who are these guys running through the snow, criminals escaping?” he said. “I’m not getting engaged with these stories. From the consumer’s standpoint, they’re missing an opportunity.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 9, 2013, on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Weekly Doses of Survival and Competition to Build Viewer Loyalty. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe